Through the lens of legal consciousness, this paper analyzes institutional dissatisfaction within the backdrop of profound skepticism directed at formal institutions, particularly within the context of post-October 2019 Chilean society. It aims at inquiring into the relationship between the expression of deep state antipathy and the stance that individuals manifest regarding legality. The paper reports on the findings derived from 12 focus groups, categorized by age, gender and location. We find that despite prevalent negative sentiments harbored by individuals toward these establishments, interviewees continue to use the language of law, expressing their dissatisfaction as frustrated formal entitlements or a lack of enforcement of the law regarding corrupt elites. We conclude that the existence of a gap between normative expectations and the acute rejection of the fulfillment of those expectations by institutional actors points to a structure of opportunities conducive to the emergence of more authoritative forms of state power.

This article explores the workings of social and territorial stigma among residents of an stigmatized neighborhood in Santiago de Chile in the context of nationwide conflict. By attending to the narratives of social organizers, it shows how stigma framed the narratives of the Chilean revolt of October 2019 produced by two female organizers older than fifty years without tertiary education. It argues that, for those with less educational and political resources, stigma can help think through a social conflict by translating broader political issues into everyday life experiences and can both constrain and enable different forms of engagement in the revolt. The narratives were obtained by ethnographic interviews carried out in a broader project of the unfolding of the unrest in Santiago’s peripheries between November 2019 and July 2020.

The current political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest that the city has not seen since the riots of 1966–67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong's success, which extended into the period of political uncertainty in the 1980s. Transcending the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, this catchphrase was adopted as the slogan of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government in its bid for legitimacy through socioeconomic appeals. Against this perennial state rhetoric, grassroots protesters began to demand “Democracy and Freedom” around June Fourth. These public demands have escalated since the Umbrella Movement in an environment of socioeconomic regression. Examining these two pairs of keywords—prosperity/stability and democracy/freedom—this article underscores the contention in the legitimacy of governance in Hong Kong since the closing decades of British rule. This analysis indicates that it would be unproductive for the governing authorities or the protesters to deny the earnestness of either the political or socioeconomic assertions in the ongoing contention of legitimacy to govern Hong Kong.

Studies of the causes of social unrest typically focus on structural factors or diffusion. This article demonstrates the importance of considering their interaction and reveals a complex interplay between the two. This interaction is examined in the context of the English Swing riots of 1830–1831, in which it is possible to observe the structural factors relevant to each specific incident; this is often impossible when analyzing more recent cases of unrest. The authors find that the riots were triggered by economic factors and that diffusion more than tripled the direct effect of changes in local factors. Economic factors and the presence of potential riot leaders made an area more susceptible to the incoming diffusion of riots. The ways in which structural factors and diffusion interact is relevant to both historical and recent instances of social unrest.

Claims that China's people are exhibiting a rising “rights consciousness” have become commonplace, with some suggesting this phenomenon is driving political change. Yet it is often unclear what the concept means, leading to ambiguous or contradictory conclusions from field research. In order to create a basis for more systematic analysis, we develop a rational choice framework that characterizes three different factors that could lead to rights-conscious behaviour: changing values, changing government policies, and changing expectations of the behaviour of others. What rising rights consciousness implies for social stability can vary dramatically, depending on which change is at work. Rights consciousness resulting from changes in values or in shared expectations of behaviour is destabilizing for the CCP's continued rule, whereas rights consciousness derived from government policies has a stabilizing effect. While in practice these can be interrelated in complex ways, empirical research would benefit from greater attention to these distinctions.